Film Review: The Dead Next Door (1989)

Written and directed by J.R. Bookwalter, and starring Pete Ferry, Bogdan Pecic, Michael Grossi, Jolie Jackunas, Robert Kokai, Floyd Ewing Jr., Roger Graham, and Maria Markovic.

"The government sets up a Zombie squad after an epidemic has made the world run rampant with living corpses. Raimi, Mercer, Kuller, and others head off to Ohio to try and find a cure to the epidemic but soon run into a crazy cult of zombie lovers who are set on preserving the zombies and letting a new world be born because they believe that it's God's will. When Mercer gets infected with the zombie virus, Raimi and the others must work quickly to find a cure and avoid the cult."

So, let's say you're driving along, trying to escape a bunch of people that want to kill you. You decide to go off road, but there are some trees blocking your path. What do you do? Throw a grenade out the window and blow up the trees, of course. But wait...shit, you forgot your friend back at the house. Screw it. You'll come back later for him, right? What about if you saw a lone zombie walking along at the top of a hill? What would you do? That's right. Throw a grenade at him, so that you can draw scores of other zombies right to your location, presumably for more grenade-tossing practice. How about if a zombie is trying to bite your partner? See a pattern? Yes, you put the grenade in the zombie's mouth, pull the pin, and throw him out the window. Add all of that up, and it sounds like an amazing movie that I'd completely dig. Yet, it wasn't, and I didn't. What happened?

"The film was shot on Super-8, which is typically amateur grade film only used for home movies. Everyone involved worked on the film for free." Taking that into account, and the fact that it was filmed over the course of four years on roughly $75,000, I truly do appreciate many parts of the film. But unfortunately, the faults, in my opinion, outweigh what the director got right. Let me step back for a few though, and point out a couple of things. For instance, there's more than one nod to Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, and with good reason: "Sam Raimi produced the film under the pseudonym 'The Master Cylinder' using a portion of his payment from Evil Dead 2. Bruce Campbell dubbed the voices of two characters that were Raimi and Carpenter. The movie was produced over nearly four years, in Akron, Ohio, for next to nothing." It's quite obvious, especially with the aid of Sam Raimi and the assistance of Bruce Campbell, that Bookwalter is a fan of horror. "Many of the characters are named after people who have made their marks in the horror and zombie movie fields, such as Savini, Carpenter, Romero, Raimi, and King."

This movie does a lot of things right. For starters, the gore is absolutely amazing considering its minuscule budget. In fact, it puts quite a few other zombie films, with two or three times its budget, to shame. There's more than a few scenes that I sat in awe by how violent and well-shot they were. I especially enjoyed scenes from the last third of the movie with Mercer tied up in the cult assembly. It was quite macabre, you could say, compared to the rest of the flick. Without giving anything away, these scenes also lead to an interesting twist. But I also felt that, while a great idea at heart, it never fully comes to fruition, leaving me a little disappointed. Another aspect to the film that really stood out was the music, surprisingly. I rarely ever enjoy the score to B-movies, though there are always exceptions. But in this case, music written by the director himself, the score definitely caught my attention on more than one occasion.

Where the movie falls flat for me though was the almost parody-like method in which it was filmed and acted. Now, as with all B-movies, there is always a certain amount of cheese to accompany the horror. Obviously I noticed the scene at the beginning with the zombies trying to rent other zombie movies, like Dawn of the Dead. So, I'm always willing to enjoy and/or overlook scenes such as these. But it felt different at times, in this movie, because more often than not I found myself wondering if they intended for these people, their actions, or even the plot and script to be this absolutely stupid. I sometimes found myself laughing at parts that I don't think I was meant to. Yet, even all of this could easily be forgiven, if the movie just wasn't so damned boring. Even at an hour and twenty minutes, the movie crept on at a snail's pace. The action even bored me. Of course, some of this could be blamed on the poor video quality as well. So, all in all, a sub-average film that never breaks new ground, never falls below the line that Uwe Boll's House of the Dead did, and stands as quite an accomplishment for the most expensive Super-8 movie ever made. For more information, head on over to the movie's official Myspace.

Best quote: "Welcome to Sunday school."

Film Review: Return of the Living Dead Part II (1988)

Written and directed by Ken Wiederhorn, and starring Michael Kenworthy, Marsha Dietlein, Thor Van Lingen, Dana Ashbrook, Thom Mathews, James Karen, and Suzanne Snyder.

"Curious kids open a barrel of green gas linked to a mysterious military experiment, and soon a tenebrous green cloud of fog is making its way through the creepy town cemetery. Knowing exactly where this is headed is, of course, part of the fun in this tongue-in-cheek zombie sequel. Maybe it's not as fresh as its successful predecessor, but all of the key zombie ingredients are still well preserved in this second installment: ravenous "undead" in search of human brains, severed limbs with a life of their own, and lots and lots of shrieking! Taking a hackneyed premise that is a close retelling of part I, director Ken Wiederhorn (Freddy’s Nightmares, Shock Waves) rejuvenates the genre with sporadic genuine scares, lots of plain old silliness, and some literally eye-popping special effects. Followed up a few years later with the equally enjoyable Return of the Living Dead Part III, this is a fun franchise that reminds you of what '80s horror was all about: bad synth music, and perms."
I just previously mentioned director Ken Wiederhorn's Shock Waves (1977) yesterday in my review for Dead Snow. Shock Waves was the first movie to ever feature Nazi zombies. Now, fast forward to 1988, and Wiederhorn's sequel to John Russo's The Return of the Living Dead finds him back in familiar territory. Unfortunately, Part II is much less inspired than its predecessor, with its fault found firmly in the main character being a child, who for better or for worse, can't act at all, and only leads the viewer to becoming annoyed and fatigued. It had only been three years since the first movie released, but, rather quickly, the landscape and overall feel had drastically changed. Gone are all of the vibrant, colorful characters of Russo's sequel to Night of the Living Dead, and in its place are boring, clichéd suburbanites that you can only hope meet a timely demise at the hands (or teeth) of the living dead.

But that's not to say that Part II is all bad. The gore is still top notch, there's a few laughs thrown in the mix, and despite all of the movie's cons, the familiarities found in the sequel are a definite plus. Thom Mathews and James Karen both return for the movie, though playing different (and yet, still the same characters), with homage lines such as: "If you like this job." and "Like this job?" It's one of the few nice touches really. But even the Tarman makes an appearance, albeit a short one. Though, just to clear the confusion, his head didn't grow back. It's simply another zombie from the same kind of Trioxin barrel. Though the comedy elements of the film are generally too tacky to enjoy, a few scenes gave me a chuckle: "A zombie dress up and looks like Michael Jackson makes a cameo appearance at the end of the film. While being electrocuted he performs some signature Michael Jackson dance moves."

While keeping the same rules of the undead from the first film, Part II adds one necessary new law for the zombies of the Return of the Living Dead series: "In this film it's revealed that the only thing which truly stops the zombies, without the risk of reanimating more corpses, is powerful electric discharges. The electric discharge can stop the reanimating effect created by Trioxin without generating Trioxin fumes the way cremation can." This ultimately sets the stage for a final showdown at an electrical station (which also happens to involve cow brains). While nowhere near as interesting or satisfying as the conclusion to Part I, the second film's ending is still rather amusing. Even though this movie is essential viewing if you're a genre fan, that doesn't necessarily make it an enjoyable viewing. I wouldn't go beyond a rental or late-night viewing on cable. I may be in the minority, but I found the follow-up, Return of the Living Dead 3, slightly redeeming of this mess of a movie. Make sure to listen for a cover of Boby Brickett's classic song Monster Mash playing over the end credits.

Best quote: "Look, they're ugly and they're dirty and they're dumb, and I don't even care if they are dead. I hate 'em, there's no way they're touching me!"

Film Review: The Return of the Living Dead (1985)

Directed by Dan O'Bannon, written by Dan O'Bannon, John A. Russo, Russell Steiner, and Rudy Ricci, and starring Clu Gulager, James Karen, Don Calfa, Thom Mathews, Miguel A. Núñez, Jr., Linnea Quigley, and Beverly Randolph.

"In 1966, Darrow Chemical Company was ordered by the military to develop the top secret chemical Trioxin. They were told it would be for marijuana defoliation. An accidental leak into the Pittsburgh VA Hospital morgue resulted in a contamination that literally reanimated corpses. The Army Corps of Engineers obtained the bodies in a cryonic state inside airtight biohazard drums. A shipment of six drums was lost in the rushed transport to a storage facility. The bio-warfare experimentation that could create indestructible soldiers in the event of war was launched using this new weapon: 2, 4, 5 Trioxin. The military’s orders to medical supply warehouses for cadavers are common and assumed to be for ballistic tests. What the Army did not know is that the lost Easter Eggs had been rotting in the basement of the nation’s largest medical supply warehouse in an industrial park outside Louisville, Kentucky. All was revealed the night of Friday, July 3, 1984 and by Independence Day, 12 hours after the last Egg hatched, yet another cover up had begun…"

In 1968, George Romero and John Russo released their zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, which would go on to inspire hundreds of horror movies. Romero and Russo went their separate ways, and both continued the saga in their own form. The Return of the Living Dead is Russo's answer to a sequel. The zombie rules in The Return have changed since Night of the Living Dead: they crave brains instead of human flesh, they can speak (which subsequently made its way into Romero's Day of the Dead the same year as well), they are much stronger and more intelligent, and destroying the brain no longer works. Only burning their bodies completely destroys them.

But most notable of all is the fact that these zombies can run. That's right. Zombies stopped walking and started running back in 1985. It wasn't 28 Days Later, or Zach Snyder's Dawn of the Dead remake. It was The Return of the Living Dead. Casual zombie fans often overlook this because usually the only zombie movies they've seen before the last ten years are Romero's films. Thus one can even gain a whole new perspective on Romero's dread for the fast moving undead considering his dispute with Russo, who continued his own version of sequels to their original creation. Perhaps Romero still holds a grudge and doesn't take too well to people enjoying and becoming inspired by his former colleague's own series.

"The same year Day of the Dead premiered, Night of the Living Dead co-writer John Russo released a film titled Return of the Living Dead. Russo's film offers an alternate continuity to the original film than Dawn of the Dead, but acted more as a satire than a sequel. Russo's film spawned four sequels. The last two — Return of the Living Dead: Necropolis and Return of the Living Dead: Rave from the Grave — were released in 2005 as television movies. Return of the Living Dead sparked a legal battle with Romero, who believed Russo marketed his film in direct competition with Day of the Dead as a sequel to the original film. In the case Dawn Associates v. Links, Romero accused Russo of 'appropriat[ing] part of the title of the prior work', plagiarizing Dawn of the Dead's advertising slogan ('When there is no room in hell [...] the dead will walk the earth'), and copying stills from the original 1968 film. Romero was ultimately granted a restraining order that forced Russo to cease his advertising campaign. Russo, however, was allowed to retain his title."

Together, Romero and Russo created the modern image of zombie horror, but without Romero, Russo created modern zombie camp that still resonates today, and has gone on to inspire countless cult classic, horror genre films. But not all credit can go to Russo, since "O'Bannon refused to direct it as it was written. He felt that it was too much of a serious attempt at making a sequel to Night of the Living Dead, and did not want to 'intrude so directly on Romero's turf.' It was re-written with more humor." The acting is cheesy, but intentionally so, as is the dialog, which gives more than a few good laughs. The soundtrack is a stand-alone classic, featuring deathrock and punk rock bands like SSQ, The Cramps, 45 Grave, The Damned, and The Flesheaters. But this review can't go on without mentioning the infamous Tarman, the first zombie to mutter "BRAAAINS..." on screen. Taking that into account, and his gruesome visage, even by today's standards, one can count Tarman among the few truly creepy zombies in horror history. Few living dead have appeared so disgusting.

The series has spawned four sequels since it all began, and has definitely lost its luster along the way. George Romero may not be too happy with Russo's spin-off from their Night of the Living Dead, but no one else can deny that this was Russo at his best. If he had instead opted for a more serious take on his quasi-sequel like he originally intended, I can safely say that it would not be as well remembered as this fond classic. So thank Dan O'Bannon for that. One last interesting tidbit: "Some of the zombie extras were paid more to eat real calf brains in the film. Dan O'Bannon didn't want the actors to do anything he wasn't willing to do and ate some raw calf brains first in front of them." Punks, zombies, nudity, gore, camp; what more could you possibly need? One has to wonder though, if Hot Topic had been around in 1985, then would the goth and punk kids have been hanging out there instead of a cemetery? If they would have, then they would have been just fine, right? I'd like to think so.

Best quote: "I try not too think about dying too much."

Film Review: Day of the Dead (1985)

Written and directed by George A. Romero, and starring Lori Cardille, Terry Alexander, Joe Pilato, Jarlath Conroy, Anthony Dileo Jr., Richard Liberty, and Sherman Howard.

"A zombie apocalypse has ravaged the Earth whilst America's last surviving humans study them from within an underground military establishment. The survivors in the film are horrified at the prospect that they 'are the only ones left', creating a crisis within human civilization over whether or not the idea of human society should be continued or abandoned. The living characters in the film are made up of three distinctive groups, each of whom have been given a task by the government - but since the government is no longer providing oversight (and may no longer exist) each group is becoming increasingly subject to temptations that go beyond their instructions. The scientists have been ordered to find a resolution to the epidemic but are tempted to violate nature's boundaries guarding life and death, soldiers who are assigned to protect the doctors appointed to study the zombies but are tempted to enforce fascistic martial law and destroy the specimens in an act of rebellion, and the civilians who are assigned to serve both groups with basic though necessary services like transportation and communication are tempted to abandon the cause and, instead, live out their last days in reckless abandon."

Since I'm going in order reviewing Romero's series, and I've looked down on Day of the Dead for years, I decided to revisit the movie again after having not seen it in a very long time. Do you want to know what I think after a repeated viewing? Day of the Dead is the best movie Romero has ever made. Hell, even Romero agrees: "The lowest grossing film in George A. Romero's "Dead" trilogy. Nonetheless, it's gained a cult following over the last two decades, and the director himself has stated that he considers it his best film." Romero even originally intended the film to be his undead epic; "the Gone with the Wind of zombie films." While I find that a bit funny (and yet, still plausible), I feel terrible for giving this movie such a bad rap for so long. But I've come to find that zombie movie fans either love this movie or hate it. There doesn't seem to be much in between.
The movie itself is the darkest in its tone, and is the main reason that people (critics especially) have a hard time enjoying themselves. Even "Roger Ebert, who reacted favorably to other films of Romero's Dead Series, gave Day of the Dead one and a half stars." But I've come to find over the years that, in most cases he really isn't in touch with good cinema, so fuck what Ebert thinks. The distaste from some of the fans and critics probably has to due with the fact that the movie is so claustrophobic. Almost the entire movie takes place in an underground military bunker, but the bleakness of the movie is why I love it so much. I can definitely tell the Robert Kirkman's The Walking Dead comic book series is inspired in no small part by Romero's Day of the Dead. The acting is the best it has been under Romero's direction, with only a few too-dramatic scenes. But the definite stand-outs are by Lori Cardille as Sarah, Richard Liberty as Dr. Matthew Logan, or Frankenstein as they call him, Terry Alexander as John, and, of course, Sherman Howard as the zombie Bub. The dialog itself is very well-written, and might even be the reason that puts this movie at the top of my Romero series list. Even the score, by John Harrison, is the best in the series, thus far, and maybe even overall. Tom Savini is also back, doing even better make-up effects than in Dawn of the Dead.

There are a few minor complaints on my end though. No movie is perfect. As I mentioned before, some of the acting is a bit over-dramatic at times, and one of the big reasons I disliked Romero's follow-up to Day, Land of the Dead, is that these undead, decomposing people still have the ability to learn, use weapons, and, in Day's case, have the ability to speak, even if the speech is barely recognizable. Yet, for some reason, in Day of the Dead, it actually works in its favor. Frankenstein's attempt to "make the zombie behave" was actually one of my favorite parts of the movie. And the end wraps it up all so neatly that I can't help but look at Land of the Dead in a (slightly) better light. So far, to this point, Day of the Dead stands as the best zombie movie I've reviewed. Oh, and I loved the zombie crocodile at the beginning. That's actually one of the few things I could remember liking, however minor, before I watched it again.

Best quote: "We're bein' punished by the Creator. He visited a curse on us. Maybe He didn't want to see us blow ourselves up, put a big hole in the sky. Maybe He just wanted to show us He's still the Boss Man. Maybe He figure, we gettin' too big for our britches, tryin' to figure His shit out."

Short Film Review: Thriller (1983)

Michael Jackson - New Music - More Music Videos

"Michael Jackson's Thriller is an almost 14-minute long music video for the song of the same name released on December 2, 1983 and directed by John Landis who also co-wrote the screenplay with Jackson.

"Thriller was less a conventional video and more a full-fledged short subject or mini-film: a horror film spoof featuring choreographed zombies performing with Jackson. The music was re-edited to match the video, with the verses being sung one after the other followed by the ending rap, then the main dance sequence (filmed on the 3600 block of Union Pacific Avenue in East Los Angeles) to an instrumental loop, and finally the memorable finish: the choruses in a 'big dance number' climactic scene. During the video, Jackson transforms into both a zombie and a werecat (although makeup artist Rick Baker referred to it as a 'cat monster' in the 'Making of Thriller' documentary); familiar territory for Landis, who had directed An American Werewolf in London two years earlier. Co-starring with Jackson was former Playboy centerfold Ola Ray. The video was choreographed by Michael Peters (who had worked with the singer on his prior hit 'Beat It'), with Michael Jackson. The video also contains incidental music by film music composer Elmer Bernstein, who had previously also worked with Landis on An American Werewolf in London. The video (like the song) contains a spoken word performance by horror film veteran Vincent Price. Rick Baker assisted in prosthetics and makeup for the production."

I was going to eventually review this 14-minute music video, but in light of Jackson's untimely death, I figured this would be the best opportunity to do so. Born in Gary, Indiana, few have achieved the level of success as the King of Pop. Even the Guinness Book of World Records considers him to be the "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time" with 13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career, and the sale of 750 million albums worldwide. He is also one of the few artists to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice.


As far as the actual video goes, the short story is material from the great horror films, even including the voice of Horror King Vincent Price. The make-up and sets are highlights as well, though nothing can hold up to Jackson's presence and mastery of footwork. The real show starts when the dead rise from their graves (with Price's voice heard), surrounding the couple, and Jackson himself becoming a zombie. Thriller's dance sequence and costumes have inspired many others in movies, namely Ferris Bueller's Day Off, 13 Going on 30, The Wedding Singer, Shaolin Soccer, Beverly Hills Cop, Return of the Living Dead Part II, and Dead & Breakfast (which you can find the video of in my earlier review). Very few zombie movies can capture the creepiness Michael conveys with his eyes during this sequence, and you just can't help but love Thriller. The shorter version is up top, but you can watch the full version here.

Best quote: "Any similarity to actual events or persons living, dead, (or undead) is purely coincidental."